Pages

AMD Wednesday launched a set of server motherboard specifications, codenamed "Roadrunner," as part of the Open Compute Project initiated by Facebook last year.

The Project was launched to encourage the development of shareable, open standards for data center infrastructures that would drive down energy costs.

AMD’s Roadrunner platform, which was introduced at the Open Compute Summit taking place in San Antonio this week, is a single motherboard configuration that can support storage infrastructures for both high-performance computing and cloud-based services. It supports traditional rack and "Open Rack" (Open Compute Project's specification) infrastructures, leveraging AMD’s Opteron 6000 series of low-power processors.

The Roadrunner platform is optimized specifically for the financial services industry, AMD said. Aligning the platform with feedback it received from customers in the finance space, the chip maker designed Roadrunner so that it can be leveraged for a range of storage models.

"[The financials industry] have a variety of workloads and what they really wanted was a platform that was flexible enough to be deployed in a variety of places, allowing them to reduce management costs through commonality," said John Fruehe, director of product marketing for enterprise products at AMD. "Roadrunner can be deployed for general IT, storage, cloud and HPC, all areas that the financial industry is deploying servers today."

With the launch of its Roadrunner specifications, AMD became an official member of the Open Compute Project Wednesday, about one year after the initiative was launched by social networking giant Facebook. AMD said customer demand drove its decision to get on board.

"We joined Open Compute because there was a demand from our customers for AMD solutions in the program," Fruehe said. "Customers see the value in Open Compute and they want to see the value that AMD brings to initiatives in that space."

Other major tech vendors including Intel, HP, Salesforce.com, VMware, and Dell are members of the Open Compute Project. Intel has also launched motherboard specs based on the Project’s Open Rack standards, and both HP and Dell have announced storage designs -- code-named "Project Coyote" and "Zeus," respectively -- that also meet the standards.